COAL POWER Direct

By Editor-in-Chief Dr. Robert Peltier, PE
Zhou Dadi, director general (emeritus) of the Energy Research Institute at China’s National Development and Reform Commission, recently spoke at a panel discussion sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Zhou boasted that China has set aggressive short-term goals for improved energy efficiency and that his country understands that it needs to make significant reductions of CO₂ in the future. This is a remarkable statement considering that China installed over 100 GW of new coal-fired generation in 2006 and another 75 GW in 2007.

In early June, New York Gov. David Paterson proclaimed that his state would commit $6 million to buttress a carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) viability study for the development of a new 50-MW clean coal plant in Jamestown, in western New York. The circulating fluidized-bed (CFB) project, which would use pure oxygen to combust coal and subsequently capture and sequester 90% of emitted carbon dioxide (CO₂), would be “the first of its kind in the world” and could potentially enable New York firms to launch exports of the technology worldwide, Paterson promised.

By Kennedy Maize
It’s counterintuitive. But it now appears that Democratic presidential (almost) nominee Barack Obama is Big Oil’s best friend in Washington.

Three of the best-kept secrets in the U.S. today have nothing to do with national security in the traditional sense. They all involve costs: the cost of fulfilling campaign promises, a valid estimate of the cost of carbon control legislation (S. 2191) expected to reach the Senate floor in a few months, and the real […]

The Environmental Integrity Project, a Washington-based advocacy group, announced in March that CO 2 emissions from U.S. power plants increased 2.9% last year over 2006 levels. The group used 2006 and 2007 CO 2 emissions data from the U.S. EPA and the DOE’s Energy Information Administration. It’s hard to normalize CO 2 numbers — and […]

Everyone in the power generation business knows that coal will continue to be a necessary fuel source for the foreseeable future. Many of those same people are beginning to understand that, politics aside, coal plant operations in the foreseeable future won’t look like the operations of yesterday or today. But what exactly will the future […]

In recent years, Sargent & Lundy has evaluated many potential sites for new coal-fueled generation. Some of the sites studied were lands adjacent to existing power plants (brownfield sites); others were undeveloped greenfield sites. The numerous technical, environmental, economic, and regulatory issues that bear on power plant siting generally apply to both brownfield and greenfield […]

Most folks probably don’t think that power plants burning coal and ethanol — the latter touted as a having a smaller carbon footprint — have much in common. But at least one ethanol plant — Blue Flint Ethanol in Underwood, N.D. — is co-located with a coal-fired power plant in order to use its excess […]

An optimal coal pile design takes into account the site-specific (and often conflicting) needs of a new power plant early in its design — rather than using whatever land is available after the plant layout has been finalized. Determining site requirements necessitates a detailed analysis of all potential coal-fueling options. A coal pile designer should […]

Use of Powder River Basin (PRB) coal for power generation set another record in 2007. In fact, PRB coal now accounts for about 40% of all the coal fired in the U.S. to produce electricity. Yet we have barely dented the estimated 800 billion tons of the fuel’s proven reserves in Wyoming. The size of […]